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Free Thinking : The world

From New Delhi, writer Rana Dasgupta

Are We Approaching The End Of The World?

  • Rana Dasgupta
  • 3 Sep 06, 09:01 AM

I've been struck by the almost unbroken pessimism of comments on these Free Thinking blogs. In response to John McGuirk's poignant speculations about the distant future, for instance, "Carole" wrote:

"The wheels of ignorance and evil are turning fast. And the whole world is embroiled in wars and "rumours of wars". Within our own environment, behaviour and attitudes have descended to a moral low. Unless people wake up to the fact that kindness, grace, selflessness, and moral values are the only way to create a decent society, then one can forget utopia. How very sad."

And many readers were anxious about my own descriptions of rapid modernisation in Delhi, expressing a desire that this part of the world at least be protected from the ravages of corporations and developers.

A similar anxiety prevailed in the public discussions I was just involved with at the . A sense of a bewildering, directionless global society. A feeling that the way one earns one's living is not innocent, but contributes to the destruction of the world. A wistfulness about things past, when scale seemed manageable, and cultures intact.

John wrote in his posting:

"In the 1950’s a group of so called experts made predictions as to what the world would be like by 2000. They forecast we would be living in the utopia I mentioned earlier, they could not have been more wrong."

What happened to that optimism? Why are we so spiritually exhausted, and so unable to believe in our own future? Why has it become so much easier for us to believe in the imminent destruction of the world than in the contentment of future generations?

The questions are enormous, of course. I just want to make a couple of observations that relate to cities. And here I want to return to my own domain, which is that of fiction writing.

In 1997, the brilliant American novelist Don DeLillo wrote a book called which told a 50-year narrative of America, beginning in the 1950s. DeLillo describes a walk in the Bronx from those early years:

Even in this compact neighborhood there were streets to revisit and men doing interesting jobs, day labor, painters in drip coveralls or men with sledgehammers he might pass the time with, Sicilians busting up a sidewalk, faces grained with stone dust. The less a job pays, Bronzini thought, the harder the work, the more impressive the spectacle. Or a waiter having a smoke during a lull, one of those fast-aging men who are tired all the time. The waiters had tired lives, three jobs, backaches and bad feet. They were more tired than the men in red neckerchiefs who swung the heavy hammers. They smoked and coughed and told him how tired they were and looked for a place on the sidewalk where they might situate the phlegm they were always spitting up.

There are people who lead hard lives, but they are people: they are doing “interesting jobs,” and you can pass the time with them, talk, smoke... Compare a description of the same landscape from the same book after the elapse of four decades. By now it can be reported only from safely inside a car, and the human figures have become passing glimpses, a ghostly, terrifying underclass without history or mind:

There were networks of vermin, craters chocked with plumbing fixtures and sheetrock. There were hillocks of slashed tires laced with thriving vine. Gunfire sang at sunset off the low walls of demolished buildings … Teenage boys in clusters, armed drug dealers – these were the men of the immediate streets. She didn’t know where the others had gone, the fathers living with second or third families, hidden in rooming houses or sleeping under highways in refrigerator boxes, buried in the potter’s field on Hart Island.

The book manages to evoke working-class men from the 1950s with ease, but by the time of the 1990s its voice has become more parochial, fearful and unknowing. The poor of America are no longer “working men”, no longer the Sicilian road-breakers or the tired waiters; they are a lurking, spectral presence whose human experience it becomes impossible to imagine.

Does this relate to our real experience of cities? Do we feel as if we knew the full spectrum of humanity in our cities better in the past, and that in the future we will be even more alienated and threatened? Have the people we share our cities with been transformed for us from fellow citizens into menacing brutes who have no understanding of the kinds of lives we wish to live?

If so, if we are to imagine the future anew, will our work consist in examining the nature of our own limited imaginations? In trying to imagine new kinds of citizenship that can link us to the people who currently fall outside? In rejecting the standards of normality that constitute our small islands of familiarity and consign everything else to fear?

Comments

  1. At 03:57 PM on 03 Sep 2006, Sacha wrote:

    I will begin this comment with the same question as the posting, "Are we approaching the end of the world?"
    I would think the question would be more correctly stated as have our societies changed? The depictions provided above of a world at two different time points would arguably be no different if reversed. Those familiar with mid-20th century American literature, notably African-American literature, could compare the latter depiction to life in several large, impoverished urban centres in the 1940s, 50s and 60s. The former could become the stories of many 21st century immigrants to large North American cities. For me, that does not predict the end of the world or of society; rather, it re-asserts that those who reside in a world of perceived and actual privilege, continue to remain isolated from a world that always existed. Segregation continues unabated; perhaps not on purpose but it is there in the form of demographic differences in education, income and lifestyle. Yet, if it were not self-imposed, I question the proliferation of "secured" and "walled" communities that are forming throughout North America.

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  2. At 12:48 PM on 04 Sep 2006, Kala Rao wrote:


    Do we feel as if we knew the full spectrum of humanity in our cities better in the past, and that in the future we will be even more alienated and threatened?

    That certainly seems the case where I live. Just today the papers have a chilling story about a `new city' on the outskirts of Bombay set up by `victims' who fled the city after the 1993 ethnic riots. We have seen whole new vegetarian concalves come up based on the principle of exclusion. Doesn't say much for our cosmopolitan spirit, does it? Amartya Sen has some interesting things to say about identity and violence in his latest book.

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  3. At 10:58 PM on 04 Sep 2006, wrote:

    If we are arriving at the end of the world, it is because humanity has permitted it.

    In the American Continent, humanity kills itself gradually with its culture of death [imposed by "moralistic" societies such as those emanating from Washington, La Habana, Caracas].

    I hope humanity will wake up and get rid of the leaders [hopefully through peaceful means] that cause war and death.

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  4. At 07:28 PM on 05 Sep 2006, Richard O'shea wrote:

    I think that the "The end is nigh" syndrome stems from an intuitive understanding that the current course of humanity will result in an end. IMHO, the social deprivation and maintenance of the principle of untouchables stems soley from luxury, which brings division.

    Lets face it, life has become a pay as you go system that somehow doesn't seem to be about living at all. If you want a good life then you had better hope that you have the fiscal power to do so, or you find a way to get it, and that sucks.

    Goods and services I understand, money... nope, I have no clue what that's about.

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  5. At 01:36 AM on 06 Sep 2006, fitz wrote:

    the one thing that many people fear in their lives is "change". We get comfortable with what we have and do and although we can accept slow change the fast pace of life today is disarming.

    so for many of us, we are approaching the end of the world - "our world" that is. We often look at the past with rose coloured glasses and always believe it was better that what we have now.

    We also as humans tend not to see behind or in front in 100 year views, and so like politicians can only look forward to less than a decade.

    we cannot imagine what our lives will be like in 10 years time.

    so yes many of us experience 'the end of the world' but that doesn't necessarily mean that the bigger world or cosmos is about to end.


    Depends also whether you believe the glass is half full of water or half empty!

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  6. At 09:22 AM on 06 Sep 2006, jason wrote:

    Things just change, tis the way of things.

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